29 November 1858 – 5 December 1858

P. M. — To Hill. About three inches of snow fell last evening, and a few cows on the hillside have wandered about in vain to come at the grass. They have at length found that place high on the south side where the snow is thin- nest. How bright and light the day now! Methinks it is as good as half an hour added to the day. White houses no longer stand out and stare in the landscape. The pine woods snowed up look more like the bare oak woods with their gray boughs. The river meadows show now far off a dull straw-color or pale brown amid the general white, where the coarse sedge rises above the snow; and distant oak woods are now more distinctly reddish. It is a clear and pleasant winter day. The snow has taken all the November out of the sky. Now blue shadows, green rivers,— both which I see, —and still winter life. I see partridge and mice tracks and fox tracks, and crows sit silent on a bare oak-top. I see a living shrike caught to-day in the barn of the Middlesex House.

The shrike was very violent for a long time, beating itself against the bars of its cage at Stacy’s. To-day it is quiet and has eaten raw meat. Its plain dark ash-colored crown and back are separated by a very distinct line from the black wings. It has a power- ful hawk-like beak, but slender legs and claws. Close to, it looks more like a muscicapa than anything. P. M. — To Walden with Channing, and Fair Haven Hall. It isa pleasant day and the snow melting considerably. We stand on the Pout’s Nest, now frozen, with snow ice added to the old, so that it will bear, — a coarse frozen white batter, — and the hills around are covered with snow, though Walden is open. Itisa perfect winter scene. This withdrawn but ample recess in the woods, with all that is necessary for a human residence, yet never referred to by the London Times and Galignani’s Messenger, as some of those arctic bays are. Some are hastening to Europe and some to the West Indies, but here is a bay never steered for. These nameless bays where the Times and Tribune have no correspondent are the true bays of All Saints for me. Green pines on this side, brown oaks on that, the blue sky overhead, and this white counterpane all around. It is an insignifi- cant fraction of the globe which England and Russia and the filibusters have overrun. The open pond close by, though considerably rippled to-day, affects me as a peculiarly mild and genial object by contrast with this frozen pool and the snow-covered shore, and I sit down on the shore in the sun, on the bare rocks. ‘There seems to be a milder air above it, as the water within it is milder. * ee ea ROK, ; = fac 74s iin s rT en a pers Going westward through Wheeler’s Owl Wood to- ward Weird Dell, Well Meadow Field, I beheld a pecu- liar winter scene, seen many times before but forgotten. The sun, rather low, is seen through the wood with a cold, dazzling white lustre, like that of burnished tin reflected from the silvery needles of the pines. No powerful light streams through, but you stand in the quiet and somewhat sombre aisles of a forest cathedral, where cold green masses alternate with pale-brown but warm leather-colored ones, almost ruddy (you are in- clined to call them red).* These are the internal deco- rations, while dark trunks, streaked with snow, rise on all sides, and a pure white floor stretches around, and perhaps a single patch of yellow sunlight is seen on the white shaded floor. The short afternoons are come. Yonder dusky cloud- mass in the northwest will not be wafted across the sky before yonder sun that lurks so low will be set. We see purple clouds in the east horizon. But did ever clouds flit and change, form and dissolve, so fast as in this clear, cold air? For it is rapidly grow- ing colder, and at such a time, with a clear air and wind and shifting clouds, I never fail to see mother-o’-pearl tints abundant in the sky. , Wesee the tracks of a hunter and his hounds who have gone along the path from the Dell to the Cliffs. The dog makes a genuine track with his five toes, an honest dog’s track, and if his master went barefoot we should count five toe-prints in his track too, and they would be seen to resemble each other remotely; but now we see only the track of a boot, and I thought the dog must be dis- gusted to tread in it. Walking thus where a man and two dogs had recently passed along, making a trail only a few inches wide, treading in one another’s tracks al- ternately, the impression was that they had constantly crowded on one another, though in fact the dogs may have been a quarter of a mile ahead [of] or behind their master. The dog rosette identical [with that] which is spotted all over Greece. They go making these perfect imperfect [ste] impressions faster than a Hoe’s cylinder power-press. Coming over the side of Fair Haven Hill at sunset, we saw a large, long, dusky cloud in the northwest horizon, apparently just this side of Wachusett, or at least twenty miles off, which was snowing, when all the rest was clear sky. It was a complete snow-cloud. It looked like rain falling at an equal distance, except that the snow fell less directly and the upper outline of a part of the cloud [was] more like that of a dusky mist. It was [not] much of a snow-storm, just enough to partially obscure the sight of the mountains about which it was falling, while the cloud was apparently high above them, or it may have been a little this side. The cloud was of a dun color, and at its south end, near where the sun was just about to set, it was all aglow on its under side with a salmon fulgor, making it look warmer than a fur- nace at the same time that it was snowing. In short, I saw a cloud, quite local in the heavens, whose south end rested over the portals of the day, twenty and odd miles off, and was lit by the splendor of the departing sun, and from this lit cloud snow was falling. It was merely an extensive flurry, though it may have lasted twenty minutes. I have seen a dark cloud as wide as the sky rolling up from the northwest and blasting all my hopes, at sight of which I have dismissed the sun for three weeks and resigned myself to my fate. But when, after being ab- sorbed in other meditations, I have looked round for that cloud half an hour after, [ have distinguished only an indistinct white film far in the southeast which only added to the glory of the day by reflecting its light. The river may be said to have frozen generally last night. That was a remarkable prospect from the side of Fair Haven Hill just before the sun set, a strong cold north- west wind blowing, and as good a winter prospect as the arctic regions present, — the brilliant Blessed Isles al- ready gathered about the portals of the day, and mother- o’-pearl clouds forming and dissolving in the crisped air between the zenith and the west horizon, while at least twenty miles off (at first thirty) in the northwest a vast dark dun-colored cloud whose southern end over- lapped the setting sun, a glowing canopy, was snowing on the mountains seen dimly beneath it. It was a rare and strange sight, that of a snow-storm twenty miles off on the verge of a perfectly clear sky. ‘Thus local is all storm, surrounded by serenity and beauty. The terres- trial mountains were made ridiculous beneath that stu- pendous range. I said to my companion, “There comes a storm which will cover the earth four feet deep. Make haste and do your necessary work before the night 39 comes.” But before we had got home I saw it in the east still further off, — not having seen it pass us, — a pale ethereal film, almost dissolved in the sky, as in- distinct as a fabulous island. In these clear, cold days fear no cloud. They vanish and dissolve before the cloud-consuming air. This air snaps them up like a dog his meat. Bare hickories now seen over the shining surface of the snow suggest a cold equal to that of the Cold Friday. As I go up the hill eastward while the sun is setting, I see a tinge of green reflected from its surface under my face, and the scattered clouds in the east are greener yet. C. thought that if he lived in Weird Dell — which I talked of buying — he should come and sit on the north- west side every night and see the shadows steal gradu- ally across it. Just before the sun disappeared we saw, just in the edge of the horizon westward from Acton, maybe eight miles off, a very brilliant fire or light, just like a star of the first magnitude or a house burning without smoke, and this, though so far and so brilliant, was undoubt- edly only the sun reflected from some gilt weathercock there. So incredibly brilliant are all surfaces now. It was pure flame, larger than a house, precisely as if the planet Venus rested in the horizon’s edge. Possibly the weathercock was nearer, but we both concluded that it was not. The sun seen setting through the snow-carpeted woods, with shimmering pine-needles or dark-green masses and warm brown oak leaves for screens. With the advent of snow and ice, so much cold white, the browns are warmer to the eye. All the red that is in oak leaves and huckleberry twigs comes out. A cloud, then, which glows high above the portals of the day seven or eight minutes before the sun disappears, may be some twenty miles off only. Neither England nor America have [sic] any right to laugh at that sentence in the rare book called “The Blazon of Gentry,” written by a zealous student of her- aldry, which says after due investigation that “Christ was a gentleman, as to the flesh, by the part of his mother, . . . and might have borne coat-armor. The apostles also were gentlemen of blood, and many of them descended from that worthy conqueror Judas Machabeus; but, through the tract of time, and perse- cution of wars, poverty oppressed the kindred and they were constrayned to servile workes.’’ Whatever texts we may quote or commentaries we may write, when we consider the laws and customs of these two countries we cannot fail to perceive that the above sentence is perfectly of a piece with our practical commentary on the New Testament. The above is really a pertinent reason offered why Christianity should be embraced in England and America. Indeed, it is, accordingly, only what may be called “respectable Christianity” that is at all generally embraced in the two countries. I read that a woman picked a pint of ripe red rasp- berries at Bunker Hill Cliff, where they get the Quincy granite, October Ist, this year.’ There is a late greenness accompanied by a few yel- low flowers, a November greenness, methinks, corre- sponding to the early greenness of the spring and its blossoms. Early in November (and late in October) lycopodiums and evergreen ferns (the small botrychium sheds pollen then, as well as several lycopodiums) have their day, under the yellow flowers of the witch-hazel and amid a few lingering goldenrods, as in spring green radical leaves are associated with alder and willow blossoms. The cold greens have their day so late in the fall. I do not speak so much of a lingering verdure, but of one which then is most flourishing and, you may say, greenest before the lichen days have come. I cannot but see still in my mind’s eye those little striped breams poised in Walden’s glaucous water. They balance all the rest of the world in my estimation at present, for this is the bream that I have just found, and for the time I neglect all its brethren and am ready to kill the fatted calf on its account. For more than two centuries have men fished here and have not distin- guished this permanent settler of the township. It is not like a new bird, a transient visitor that may not be seen again for years, but there it dwells and has dwelt permanently, who can tell how long? When my eyes first rested on Walden the striped bream was poised in it, though I did not see it, and when Tahatawan paddled his canoe there. How wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it! America re- news her youth here. But in my account of this bream I cannot go a hair’s breadth beyond the mere statement that it exists, — the miracle of its existence, my contem- porary and neighbor, yet so different from me! I can only poise my thought there by its side and try to think like a bream for a moment. I can only think of precious jewels, of music, poetry, beauty, and the mystery of life. I only see the bream in its orbit, as I see a star, but I care not to measure its distance or weight. The bream, appreciated, floats in the pond as the centre of the sys- tem, another image of God. Its life no man can ex- plain more than he can his own. I want you to perceive the mystery of the bream. I have a contemporary in Walden.‘ It has fins where I have legs and arms. I have a friend among the fishes, at least a new acquaint- ance. Its character will interest me, I trust, not its clothes and anatomy. I do not wantit to eat. Acquaint- ance with it is to make my life more rich and eventful. It is as if a poet or an anchorite had moved into the town, whom [ can see from time to time and think of yet oftener. Perhaps there are a thousand of these striped bream which no one had thought of in that pond, — not their mere impressions in stone, but in the full tide of the bream life. Though science may sometimes compare herself to a child picking up pebbles on the seashore, that is a rare mood with her; ordinarily her practical belief is that it is only a few pebbles which are not known, weighed and measured. A new species of fish signifies hardly more than a new name. See what is contributed in the scien- tific reports. One counts the fin-rays, another measures the intestines, a third daguerreotypes a scale, etc., etc.; otherwise there’s nothing to be said. As if all but this were done, and these were very rich and generous con- tributions to science. Her votaries may be seen wan- dering along the shore of the ocean of truth, with their backs to that ocean, ready to seize on the shells which are cast up. You would say that the scientific bodies were terribly put to it for objects and subjects. A dead specimen of an animal, if it is only well preserved in alcohol, is just as good for science as a living one pre- served in its native element.

When I first saw that snow-cloud it stretched low along the northwest horizon, perhaps one quarter round and half a dozen times as high as the mountains, and was remarkably horizontal on its upper edge, but that edge was obviously for a part of the way very thin, composed of a dusky mist which first suggested snow. When, soon after, it had risen and advanced and was plainly snowing, it was as if some great dark machine was sifting the snow upon the mountains. ‘There was at the same time the most brilliant of sunsets, the clearest and crispiest of winter skies. We have had every day since similar slight flur- ries of snow, we being in their midst.

P. M. — To Walden. A deliciously mild afternoon, though the ground is covered with snow. The cocks crowed this morning as of yore.

Some sugar maples, both large and small, have still, like the larger oaks, a few leaves about the larger limbs near the trunk. P. M. — To Walden. Snowed yesterday afternoon, and now it is three or four inches deep and a fine mizzle falling and freez- ing to the twigs and stubble, so that there is quite a glaze. ‘The stiffened ice-coated weeds and grasses on the causeway recall past winters. These humble with- ered plants, which have not of late attracted your atten- tion, now arrest it by their very stiffness and exaggerated size. Some grass culms eighteen inches or two feet high, which nobody noticed, are an inexhaustible supply of slender ice-wands set in the snow. The grasses and weeds bent to the crusty surface form arches of various forms. It is surprising how the slenderest grasses can support such a weight, but the culm is buttressed by an- other icy culm or column, and the load gradually taken on. In the woods the drooping pines compel you to stoop. In all directions they are bowed down, hanging their heads. The large yellowish leaves of the black oak (young trees) are peculiarly conspicuous, rich and warm, in the midst of this ice and snow, and on the causeway the yellowish bark of the willows gleams warmly through the ice. The birches are still upright, and their numer- ous parallel white ice-rods remind me of the recent gos- samer-like gleams which they reflected. How singularly ornamented is that salamander! Its brightest side, its yellow belly, sprinkled with fine dark spots, is turned downward. Its back is indeed orna- mented with two rows of bright vermilion spots, but these can only be detected on the very closest inspec- tion, and poor eyes fail to discover them even then, as I have found.